Tag Archives: saturated fat

I am reading a remarkable book, THE MIRACULOUS RESULTS OF EXTREMELY HIGH DOSES OF THE SUNSHINE HORMONE VITAMIN D3 by Jeff T Bowles, that is blowing me away. His hypothesis that many of today’s ailments can be traced to our low levels of vitamin D is fascinating. But what is striking to me are some of the questions he asks, for instance when he wonders why our blood sugar can skyrocket he comes to the remarkable conclusion that it might have something to do with changing of seasons and hibernating. This leads him to the hypothesis that the hormone Vitamin D might be responsible as the levels in our blood rise and fall due to the length of the day. This may alert our body to put on fat and protect our body from cold. Here is Jeff:

I then started wondering about blood sugar. What in the world could increased blood sugar protect you from? And then it hit me! I remembered some experiments that were conducted on a (poor) Beagle where they wanted to put the dog into suspended animation with no vital signs and then see if he could be resuscitated. They did this by reducing his body temperature to about freezing. In order to prevent freezing damage to his tissues, they added a large amount of glycerol to his blood. This lowered the freezing point of his blood so that they could reduce his body temperature dramatically and not worry about crystallization damage. I also remembered this is what they do to people’s bodies who have signed up to be frozen upon death with hopes of being resurrected in the future after technology advances make resuscitation possible (good luck). AHA! Possibly high glucose levels in the blood protect the hibernating body from the danger of tissue damage due to freezing! By boosting the sugar level of blood, it reduces blood’s freezing and crystallization temperature! Continue reading →

Getting some push-back from relatives regarding my diet which now not only includes Very Low Carbohydrate (VLC) regime but also a Intermittent Fasting (IF) component. I eat one VLC meal a day for dinner. Some of my relatives seem to think that this sort of regime is “not good for me”. Specifically they have a problem with the fasting part. Let’s see what the experts say.

First let me lead off with the first article below regarding Calorie Restriction which is the only proven way to radically extend life on test animals. The Wiki link explains that they are seeing increases of 30 to40% in the life spans of rats and mice. In primates the results are not yet final as they tend to live a lot longer. But so far in the 20th year of the study 80% of the calorie restricted monkey’s are still alive compared to 50% of the controls. Additionally the dieting monkey’s show significantly less diabetes, cancer, and heart and brain disease.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Reduce, recycle and rebuild is as important to the most basic component of the human body, the cell, as it is to the environment. And a University of Florida study shows just how much the body benefits when it “goes green,” at least if you’re a rat: Cutting calories helps rodents live longer by boosting cells’ ability to recycle damaged parts so they can maintain efficient energy production. via University of Florida News – UF scientists reveal how dietary restriction cleans cells.

So then after that article let’s discuss a way of perhaps getting the same results without having to starve all the time. First off a study showing that the protective effects of Calorie Restriction (CR) are also seen in patients who fast but while calorie restriction can take weeks to months to be effective, fasting gives results within days. From the study:

Preliminary reports indicate that fasting for up to 5 days followed by a normal diet, may also protect patients against chemotherapy without causing chronic weight loss. By contrast, the long-term 20 to 40% restriction in calorie intake (dietary restriction, DR), whose effects on cancer progression have been studied extensively for decades, requires weeks-months to be effective, causes much more modest changes in glucose and/or IGF-I levels, and promotes chronic weight loss in both rodents and humans.

What did you have for dinner tonight? I had a steak, cauliflower with butter, asparagus with even more butter with everything topped with an outstanding blue cheese sauce…amazing meal. I ate the fat and the protein…amazing.

World Renown Heart Surgeon Speaks Out On What Really Causes Heart Disease

We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong.. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries,today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.

I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled “opinion makers.” Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.

The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.

It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.

The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.

Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.

Inflammation is not complicated — it is quite simply your body’s natural defence to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus. The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if wechronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process,a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.

What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body? Well,smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.

The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream dietthat is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. Thisrepeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.

Let me repeat that: The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine.

What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.

While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war.Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed withomega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.

How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?

Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.

What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.

While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator — inflammation in their arteries.

Let’s get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6’s are essential -they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell — they must be in the correct balance with omega-3’s.

If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation.

Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer’s disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.

There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such ascolorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation- causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them.

Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labelled polyunsaturated. Forget the “science” that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.

The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.

What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.

Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital , Mesa , AZ. His private practice, Cardiac Care Center was in Mesa, AZ. Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease. He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation that promotes human health with a focus on helping large corporations promote wellness. He is also the author of The Cure for Heart Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie.

This bears remembering. And when you eat you shouldn’t be eating ANY carbs…none, zero, zilch, nada! Don’t give your cancer the glucose it craves…starve the bastard cells.

Getting ready to release another post where the digestive system of a dog is compared against a cow and human. Our digestive track bears no resemblence to that of a cow. But it looks and works a lot like a dogs…dogs don’t eat anything but meat given a choice and given a choice between meat and fat they choose fat. hehe…ask me how I know!

Man may not live by bread alone, but cancer in animals appears less resilient, according to a study that found chemotherapy drugs work better when combined with cycles of short, severe fasting.

Even fasting on its own effectively treated a majority of cancers tested in animals, including cancers from human cells.

The study in Science Translational Medicine, part of the Science family of journals, found that five out of eight cancer types in mice responded to fasting alone: Just as with chemotherapy, fasting slowed the growth and spread of tumors.

First off let me explain that this feels a bit like bragging…truth is it probably is bragging. But I excuse this blatant self praise by hoping that some middle aged fat bastard might read this and grab a hold of life again. It feels EXCELLENT to be stronger than I have been in 35 years. Heck I might even be stronger than that…regardless it is doable. You don’t have to be a fat ass, but you have to want it. I hope that my blatant bragging might be enough to get someone off their asses and get their youth back.

January 2011 after getting my big fat 245 pound ass kicked by the flu, first time my family ever saw me in bed sick, and then being told I was too fat to get the best rate by a medical exam for life insurance (flu scared the wife into realizing I wasn’t going to live forever) I decided it was time to stop abusing my health and do something about it. This would be the third time in my life that I lost a lot of weight. The first time was at 30 years old when I stared into the mirror shaving one morning and a fat bastard with a big belly looked back at me. The second time was some years after quitting smoking when I gained all my weight back that I had lost 7 years previous. The first time I lost my weight I did it by riding around 2 to 4 hours a day on my bicycle in Las Vegas. I don’t remember my diet but I know I was eating a lot of pasta. The second time, at 46, I did it by using Atkins. Matter of fact I can remember the exact day I fell off my diet…had the kids with me walking into Albertsons grocery store and the evil bastards had a Krispy Kreme display by the front door. Well hell I picked up a dozen glazed and finished them off by myself before I got to the register…think I might have growled at the kids when they asked for one.

Here I am in January 2011. Fat bastard hit 245 once…didn’t tell the wife cause it was too embarrassing.

Right about this time I am reading Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It by Gary Taubes. I had read Good Calories Bad Calories the year before so I had zero excuse regarding my weight. At 54 years old after a lifetime of sports from Judo to Cross Country Motorcycle racing I was officially a fat-body. Was this it? Was this all I had? Was this the moment in time when I chucked feeling good out of the window and accepted being an old fat-body full of arthritis, pain and suffering…or did I have it in me to get well, get lean and get strong one more time? I got started…with a vengeance.

Having bought Gary Taubes book Good Calories Bad Calories the previous year I knew how, I just had never followed through. But I was finally realizing that by being a fat-body I was risked not only being round and weak, but much worse, I was actually risking not being present when my kids 7, 9 and 13 grew up and had their own. Of course, losing weight is no guarantee of living forever but your odds go up and making your odds worse by bad choices seems wrong.

With “Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It” I went to work. Cutting out all forms of sugar cold turkey I saw immediate results. Within a very short time I had lost around 15 pounds and then I ran into an article in Men’s Journal “Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie“. Doing a bit of research into Rob Shaul of Mountain Athlete I discovered that I wasn’t too old to get strong again…no indeed not. Contacted Rob and he sent me a 6 week program for endurance athletes as I didn’t want to join a gym and didn’t want to hurt myself lifting heavy weight as I didn’t have a spotter. Fantastic ass-kicking program that had me getting strong at the same time that I was getting lighter and lighter. Then I stalled at 205 from 245 and nothing I did seemed to be able to get me down below 205…I was officially stuck. This was not going to do.

By this time I had finished the 6 week endurance athlete program and stunned my wife with my new found looks and strength. Indeed one night after watching a movie she dared me in front of our 3 children to carry her across the house, I simply reached down and picked up my gorgeous 6’2” 165 pounds of stunned wife and carried her across the house, it was so easy. But I wasn’t satisfied, I wanted strength and I wanted to get to 190. Read an interview with Gary where he said that as we get older our abuse of our body makes it harder and harder go lose weight by simply cutting out carbohydrates . That was depressing…I knew that insulin had something to do with it but didn’t know how to correct it beyond what I was already doing…staying in mild ketosis all the time.

5 weeks ago I came across a study that showed Intermittent Fasting might help repair the damage done to my insulin sensitivity. So I immediately started eating once a day 5 days a week. I skipped breakfast and lunch 5 days a week. On weekends I eat normally. In two weeks I dropped 8 pounds and by the fifth week I dropped to 195. But I don’t think this is all there is. I have just read about caffeine damaging insulin sensitivity. Given that I might drink 5-8 diet cokes a day I know what I need to do. I wonder what the results will be?

Here I am one year later. About 4 months ago I moved away from weights and started body weight exercises. If you are interested pick up Convict Conditioning. The other day while working out at the beach at LSU Lakes I was doing 5 sets of 5 handstand presses with 5 chin ups between sets, a group of young guys walked up. One of them said that they wouldn’t be doing THOSE…heh. Yea I am pretty happy with the results! Not done yet.

Now get up off your ass and get to work. It is a lot easier than you think.